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CULTURAL HISTORY AND EDUCATION
Jay Goulding presented the
Bata Shoe Museum Asian Heritage Month Lecture in February 2007.
Here is a profile of Jay
Goulding and his research interest:
Jay Goulding is Professor at
Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, York University. His expertise
is in classical and contemporary Chinese philosophy as well as
hermeneutics and phenomenology. He is appointed to the Graduate
Programmes in Social and Political Thought, Communication and
Culture, Education, and Sociology.
He has published widely in various
scholarly journals including Journal for the Scientific Study
of Religion, Sociological Analysis: A Journal of Comparative Religion,
Political Theory, Catalyst, Anhui Normal University Journal of
Social Sciences and Humanities, Dao: A Journal of Comparative
Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, International Journal
for Field-Being, Asian Cinema, and China Review International.
He has written for the six-volume Scribner's New Dictionary of
the History of Ideas encyclopedia with entries on Chinese and
East Asian philosophy, culture, language, history, politics and
society in both ancient and modern perspectives. In 2001, he participated
in the official return of philosophy to China with the International
Society for Chinese Philosophy, and the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences. As well, he contributed an essay to Beijing's University's
journal, Gate of Philosophy, celebrating the one hundredth anniversary
of the university and the first English language edition of a
premier journal of Chinese philosophy.
In the summer of 2005, he co-chaired the "Ontology
and Hermeneutics" conference in Shanghai that celebrated
the seventieth birthday of the prominent Chinese philosopher Cheng
Chung-ying, founder of the International Society for Chinese Philosophy,
whose work is instrumental in the rebirth of comparative philosophy
between China and the West. In the fall of 2006, Goulding delivered
guest lectures at Beijing Foreign Studies University's Foreign
Literature Institute, and at Beijing University's Institute of
Foreign Philosophy where he explained the relationships between
Daoism and phenomenology, especially the Chinese classical Daoist
philosophers Laozi and Zhuangzi as compared with the seminal European
thinkers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 2008,
he finished editing a book, China-West Interculture: Toward the
Philosophy of World Integration, Essays on Wu Kuang-ming's Thinking
for The Association of Chinese Philosophers in America series
with Global Scholarly Publications in New York.
Since York University offers a diverse venue
for teaching non-traditional topics to non-traditional students,
Goulding develops non-traditional ways of disseminating knowledge
regarding emerging areas of scholarship, namely a comparison of
Eastern and Western societies. His theoretical and methodological
bases of research and teaching are reciprocal. They revolve around
an approach whereby Eastern and Western civilizations can be compared
in terms of philosophy, religion, culture and society. Research
is as crucial for teaching as teaching is for research. Hence,
he calls his collective scholarly project "Global Comparative
Thought."
As Goulding suggests, China
today is in-between the old and the new, and in-between Eastern
and Western traditions. In recent years, many Daoist temples have
reawakened in China, and many aspects of Confucian philosophy
have re-emerged. The prominent works of the Chinese neo-Confucian
philosopher Cheng Chung-ying and the Chinese Daoist philosopher
Wu Kuang-ming are most useful for addressing these transformations
as their writings are rich in cross-cultural comparisons. Their
intriguing blending of hermeneutic phenomenology, and Chinese
philosophy acts as a guide to addressing the various rifts within
and between these categories. In the last twenty years, Goulding's
research has been inspired by both Cheng's idea of 'onto-cosmology'
and Wu's idea of 'body thinking.' Both scholars examine the polar
rotations of Chinese thought as it unfolds through hermeneutic
(interpretive) analysis and phenomenology (changes in everyday
life). Confucianism and Daoism take turns at prominent roles in
Chinese history. Phenomenology reveals the intricate layerings
of these philosophical crossings by awareness of societal contexts.
Cheng's work on both neo-Confucian thinkers (Zhu Xi, Wang Yangming),
and on Heidegger is inspiring. It helps open up new horizons for
Chinese understandings of hermeneutic phenomenology as a search
for the truth, and is crucial for responding to the American tendency
to pragmatic reductions. A close study of Cheng's work allows
Goulding to re-read Heidegger's famous Chinese students (Xiong
Wei, Hsiao Shiyi, and Chang Chungyuan) in a new fashion that introduces
onto-ethics into an otherwise incomplete ontology. Cheng's philosophy
is a path breaking guide for exploring the in-between of East
and West on philosophical, cultural, religious and cosmological
levels.
Likewise, Goulding's close study
of Wu's work activates both Eastern and Western metaphoric thinking
as a two-way osmotic membrane. This meta-metaphor negates itself
while re-inventing new vistas and new horizons. The words of the
West and the experience of the East interpenetrate each other:
the outside West in signs, the inside East in stories. The West
navigates from inside to outside, from psychic states to daily
expressions. The East navigates from outside to inside, from mundane
familiarity to the three teachings. In this sense, both East and
West are co-constitutive and mutually correcting. Drawing strength
from Zhuangzi's 'hollow,' and Heidegger's 'clearing,' Wu argues
that the West thinks too much with the mind while allowing the
body to disappear. The East lets the body do the thinking while
the mind descends down (trans-descends) into it. As Wu insists,
Chinese body thinking relies on the heart/mind (xin). Eastern
body thinking is 'concrete'; Western rationalist thought is abstract.
Goulding maintains that although
Laozi takes us immediately to the centre of stillness, Zhuangzi's
parables are the key entrances back into an understanding of the
world of the everyday. In response to the rationality of the Greek
world, Heidegger lives on the boundary slash between Being and
Nothingness. Eastern philosophy helped him feel his way (through
poetry) into a fulfilled nothingness of 'the clearing,' an opening
that is free for brightness and darkness, and for resonance and
echo.
There are many challenges with
researching and teaching East Asian thought. Concepts of 'time,'
the 'person' and the 'self' are ingrained and imbedded into Western
modes of thought. In the West, 'time' is often seen as linear
or related directly to the clock; the 'person' is the fulcrum
for rights, values and property acquisition; 'self' is firmly
tied to the idea of the individual. In the East, 'time' is often
cyclic or eternal; 'self' (if existing at all) is firmly tied
to family and groups; the 'person' is often in-between and responsive
to combinations of Confucian virtues and Daoist cosmologies.
Historically, China has not shared many of
the West's assumptions. Eastern civilizations are built and sustained
on different notions of all of the above. However, this does not
preclude some overlaps or forms of reconciliation, especially
if we are sensitive to the ancient past. For Goulding, the hermeneutic
task is to understand what these assumptions are about, where
they come from, and how do we get to them. This involves a phenomenological
bracketing or suspending (even momentarily) of the preconceived
notions that we share in the West. The life-world can be seen
in terms of a series of concentric rings of perception: social,
philosophical, economic, political, psychological, cultural, and
cosmological. We can strip back each of these layers of perception
and investigate them as to composition and texture. Altogether,
they constitute a horizon. These rings generate a thick haze around
us that inscribes and defines our sense of being, time, consciousness
and morality. What a teacher wants to do is increase vision outside
this thick haze of personal perception. In order to understand
these new horizons, we might have to put our own out of action
for a while. This does not mean giving up Western (or Eastern)
values or assumptions. It only means placing them on the backburner
for a while. This idea of 'withholding' or 'suspension' or 'bracketing'
is not new. Rather, it is a generalized activity, more global
in perspective than Cartesian radical doubt. Minimally, it helps
the teacher of East Asian and comparative thought be more open
to possibilities, and maximally, allows the embrace of a new way
of thinking. This method of interpretive suspension that defines
hermeneutic phenomenology can be attuned to the present and to
the daily events at hand.
Making sense of the whirlwind
of complex philosophical ideas from both Western and Eastern traditions,
Goulding finds popular culture to be a simple venue to understanding
everyday experiences. The process of searching for or unveiling
or revealing is a herme-neutic task. Thus, we have the phenomenological
method mapped into the hermeneutic search for truth. In a very
basic way, Goulding utilizes these intricate ideas to unhinge
assumptions and pre-judgments on both sides of the fence: your
own world and the world that you are investigating. By engaging
with the everyday, you are entering the philosophy of the in-between.
You are neither East nor West, neither China nor Canada but somewhere
in the middle. Goulding's research, writings, and teachings try
to gently navigate students into the middle where they can help
themselves better understand Canada and the Middle Kingdom of
China.
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